The Internet is transforming corporate architectures. Businesses are now recreating themselves to become more efficient and to find new business opportunities. Various technologies have emerged to assist in the automation of companies' operations. One example of such technologies is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) designed to help companies to improve their interaction with customers. Effective CRM typically allows organizations to manage and coordinate customer interactions across multiple channels, including, for example, sales, marketing and service channels. One exemplary aspect of service CRM is field service management.
A typical field service application operates by receiving a report of a customer problem, identifying which parts and labor are needed to resolve the problem, and ordering the required parts from an inventory location. Depending on a contract between the customer and the service organization, the order may need to be fulfilled in a short or long period of time. For example, the customer's contract may require the service organization to replace a malfunctioning router in any customer's location within two hours. Typically, a service organization has a large number of inventory locations that are geographically dispersed to provide service to customers at different geographical regions. In addition, a service organization does not stock every part at each inventory location to decrease the inventory holding costs. Rather, a service organization tends to stock parts depending upon the criticality factor. In particular, a service organization usually stocks critical parts closer to the customers in local field offices (also known as expedite locations) and the less critical parts at the central distribution location that services a larger customer base. Current field service applications typically define static lists of inventory locations for each geographical region serviced by the organization and then use the same static list for all orders associated with a unique geographical region, without taking into consideration the priority level of the order, inventory replenishment costs, or any other factors specific to the contract and the inventory locations from the static list.